Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

“She’s a nice lady.”

“Yes, she is.”

“Great kid.”

“He’s a great kid, yeah,” I agreed.

“This sucks,” he said, and puffed at the cigar as he held the flame to it.

“Yes, it does.”

“I’m going to go stake out Ted Kenneally’s store. It’s, what, like a mile from here?”

Angie said, “More like three.”

“I didn’t ask her the address. Shit.”

“There’s only a few antique stores in Southie,” I said. “Kenneally’s is on Broadway, right across from a restaurant called Amrheins.”

He nodded. “Care to join me? Could be the safest place for both of you right now with Broussard out there on the loose.”

Angie said, “Sure.”

Ryerson looked at me. “Mr. Kenzie?”

I looked back at Beatrice’s house, the yellow squares of light in the living room windows, thought of the occupants on the other side of those squares, the tornado they weren’t even aware of circling their lives, gathering strength, blowing and blowing.

“I’ll meet you guys.”

Angie gave me a look. “What’s up?”

“I’ll meet you,” I said. “I got to do something.”

“What?”

“Nothing big.” I put my hands on her shoulders. “I’ll meet you. Okay? Please. Give me some room here.”

After a long look in my eyes, she nodded. She didn’t like it, but she understands my stubbornness as she understands her own. And she knows how useless it is to argue with me at certain times, the same way I recognize those moments in her.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Ryerson said.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Not me.”

It was a long shot, but it paid off.

At two in the morning, Broussard, Pasquale, and a few other members of the DoRights football squad left the Boyne. By the way they hugged in the parking lot, I could tell they’d heard about Poole’s death, and their pain was genuine. Cops, as a rule, don’t hug, unless one of them has gone down in the line.

Pasquale and Broussard talked for a bit in the parking lot after the others drove off, and then Pasquale gave Broussard a last hard hug, rapped his fists on the big man’s back, and they separated.

Pasquale drove off in a Bronco, and Broussard made his way with the careful, self-conscious steps of a drunk to a Volvo station wagon, backed out onto Western Avenue, and headed east. I stayed way back on the mostly empty avenue, and almost missed him when his taillights disappeared at the Charles River.

I speeded up because he could have turned onto Storrow Drive, cut over to North Beacon, or gone either east or west on the Mass Pike at that juncture.

From the avenue, as I craned my head, I picked up the Volvo as it slipped under a wash of light heading for the westbound tollbooths on the pike.

I forced myself to slow down and passed through the toll about a minute after he had. After about two miles, I picked up the Volvo again. It traveled in the left lane, doing about sixty, and I hung back a hundred yards and matched its speed.

Boston cops are required to live in the greater metro area, but several I know get around that by subletting their Boston apartments to friends or relatives while they live farther out.

Broussard, I discovered, lived way out. After over an hour and a departure from the turnpike onto a series of small dark country roads, we ended up in the town of Sutton, nestled in the shadows of the Purgatory Chasm Reservation and far closer to both the Rhode Island and Connecticut borders than it was to Boston.

When Broussard turned off into a steep, sloping driveway that led up to a small brown Cape, its windows obscured by shrubs and small trees, I kept going, drove until I’d reached a crossroad where the road ended at a towering forest of pine. I turned around, my lights arcing through the deep dark, so much blacker than city dark, each beam of light seeming to promise sudden revelations of creatures foraging through the night, stopping my heart with glowing green eyes.

I turned back and found the house again, drove another eighty yards until my lights illuminated a shuttered home. I pulled down a drive littered with the mulch of last autumn’s leaves, buried the Crown Victoria behind a stand of trees, and sat in it for a bit, as the crickets and the wind rustling the trees made the only sounds in what seemed the heart of the heart of pure stillness.

I woke the next morning to two gorgeous brown eyes staring in at me. They were soft and sad and deep as shafts in a copper mine. They didn’t blink.

I jumped a bit in my seat as the long white-and-brown nose tilted toward my window, and my movement startled the curious animal. Before I was even sure I’d seen it, the deer hopped over the lawn and into the trees, and its white tail flashed once between two trunks and was gone.

“Jesus,” I said aloud.

Another flash of color caught my eye, this one on the other side of the trees directly in front of my windshield. It was a rush of tan, and as I looked through the opening to my right, Broussard’s Volvo sped past on the road. I had no idea if he was heading down the road for milk or all the way back to Boston, but in either case, I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity.

I took a set of lock picks from the glove compartment, slung my camera over my shoulder, shook the cobwebs from my head, and left the car. I walked up the road, staying close to the soft shoulder, the first warm day of the year beaming down on me from a sky so blue with oxygen and free of smog I had a hard time believing I was still in Massachusetts.

As I neared Broussard’s driveway, a tall, slim woman with long brown hair holding a child by the hand stepped out at the bottom from around a corner of thick pine. She bent with the child as he picked up the newspaper at the base of the drive and handed it to her.

I was too close to stop, and she looked up and covered her eyes against the sun, smiled uncertainly at me. The child holding her hand was maybe three, and his bright blond hair and pale white skin didn’t seem a match for either the woman or Broussard.

“Hi.” The woman rose and took the child with her, perched him on her hip as he sucked his thumb.

“Hi.”

She was a striking woman. Her wide mouth cut unevenly across her face, rose a bit on the left side, and there was something sensual in the skew, the hint of a grin that had discarded all illusions. A cursory glance at her mouth and cheekbones, the sunrise glow of her skin, and I could have easily mistook her for a former model, some financier’s trophy wife. Then I looked in her eyes. The hard, naked intelligence there unsettled me. This was not a woman who’d allow herself to be put on a man’s arm for show. In fact, I was certain this woman didn’t allow herself to be put anywhere.